Secondlife declining player base

[ChinRey]

16 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Discussion of ideas leads to better ideas.

I learned Hegelian dialectic at high school. Not only did I learn it, our biology teacher was so keen on it, he drilled it into us all until it became second nature. I just can't let go of it, no matter how hard I try.

The principle is: Thesis+Anthithesis=>Synthesis.

You state something (the thesis), I disagee and state something else (the antithesis) and as long as we both accept the obvious fact that although we both may know the truth, neither knows the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we can work together and reach a conclusion (the synthesis), incorporating the best of both sides' original views.

In that model a negative response can often be quite as valuable - even more valuable - than a positive one.

That was back in the retarded 20th century though. Today, with the enightment of the internet, we know better of course. Mac Davis was one of the few who saw it coming. He wrote a song about 21st C. internet culture as early as 1949. It was a big hit and he made a lot of money from it and since that's what really matters to a musician, he was quite happy about it. But even so, nobody took it seriously. Everybody thought it was a joke - a good laugh and nothing more. It's only today we can appreciate the deep, profound meaning of his words:

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
When you're perfect in every way
I can't wait to look in the mirror
Cause I get better looking each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord It's hard to be humble,
But I'm doing the best that I can

[Phil Deakins]

That's an excellent song. I used to sing it to my daughters and they loved it. It made me smile just seeing it written here

But I'm surprised that you know it, Chin

Edited August 15, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Coffee Pancake]

It kind of falls down and dies when the antithesis is aimed at another in the discussion or the very existence of the discussion.

Edited August 15, 2018 by CoffeeDujour
stupid editor ..

[Luna Bliss]

There is no Truth, Capital 'T' in life.

How am I going to make it through the rest of my day ;0

[Nalates Urriah]

10 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Oh god .. please, go play some actual games. Combat in SL is a joke. The latency at every single point of interface with the activity is crippling. You have input lag, physics lag, viewer lag and server round trip lag all combined to turn the affair into a button mashing mess. Again .. from the perspective of a gamer, combat in SL is a sad joke.

Even other virtual worlds have managed to do it significantly better.

Black Desert, WoW, and other games have combat. I find it rigid. True some don't have lag like SL. But, those that offer less rigid and more free form combat, like Eve and Star Citizen, have horrendous lag as the number of players and action increases. The problems are similar to SL’s.

The basic complaints about SL come when people compare SL to other games. Making an equitable comparison isn’t easy and those that want to complain ignore the technical differences when making their comparisons, or simply don’t understand the tech.

WoW’s combat tends to be player verses AI bad guys, as does BD. We do not have good NPC’s and AI is painful to develop in SL. But, users get to totally control it, have great freedom in design, and simplicity.

The MMO vehicle games I know of are ALL limited to professionally designed vehicles and environments. Most are limited to 8 concurrent players for any given combat/competition. A user can’t get out of their car wearing clothes they made and dance a victory dance they animated nor have role-play-sex with the trophy girl in the backseat using 600 different animations. SL’s flexibility comes at a cost and should be part of any comparison.

The top 5 MMO vehicle games:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fapcgilpZxs

In SL things are limited more by the user/designer than the system, which does have problems. For instance, most helicopters use simple SL controls and are easy to fly. SL basic simple vehicles are basic and simple. However, one doesn’t have to stick with the system’s basic and simple. Shergood has built their own movement engine to provide much more realistic flight than any other helicopter in SL, at least that I’ve seen. 

So, users can make better things and get better results. But, for a generic all-purpose game engine, SL has had to make compromises that dedicated narrow purpose games don’t. 

SL trades some performance for flexibility. Most other MMO’s reduce flexibility and user control for performance. Most of the top MMO’s using vehicles limit users to 8 per server/shard. Limit the SL users in an area and fill it with ONLY professionally developed content and vehicles and what kind of performance do you get?

Most of us here are arguing opinion and not bothering with the facts and actual technically equitable comparisons.
 

 

[Penny Patton]

11 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Plenty of game content makes it into SL .. and it performs just as poorly as stuff we make.

No content exists in a vacuum. It's ridiculous to make a statement like this given that the game content in question is sprinkled about amongst a much larger amount of unoptimized content not suitable for realtime 3D rendering. If you built a sim using nothing but game content and using the same tricks (those SL is capable of at least) to alleviate the rendering load while designing your sim, there would be a huge difference. 

 I optimize my sims to the best of my ability given the content I have available in SL to work with, and with all of SL's graphics features enabled I still enjoy higher, more consistent framerates and experience less lag in those sims on a nearly ten year old computer than most people with modern high end gaming machine can get almost anywhere else in SL.

I agree with pretty much everything else you're saying, but the importance of optimization cannot be overstated. LL doesn't need to hold content creators to professional standards, but if they can curb even just the worst habits we frequently see in SL content, the performance improvement will be enormous.

 

[Penny Patton]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Black Desert, WoW, and other games have combat. I find it rigid. True some don't have lag like SL. But, those that offer less rigid and more free form combat, like Eve and Star Citizen, have horrendous lag as the number of players and action increases. The problems are similar to SL’s.

This is a flawed comparison. One only needs to look at screenshots of these games to see why. Black Desert and, especially, WoW are designed to run on a broad range of computers. They have relatively simple graphics compared to many modern games. In contrast, Eva and Star Citizen have extremely high end graphics. Star Citizen in particular is being aimed at people with really high end hardware. Eve and Star Citizen also, I believe, support much larger numbers of players sharing a single setting. Meanwhile, SL has these issues regardless of how small a group you have playing.

People can run modern, good looking fast action games with little to no lag if their connection and hardware are up to the task. Games like Fortnight and Overwatch depend on it. And Fortnight supports up to a hundred people in a match.

 I'm not certain if it's possible to make combat in SL ever run as smoothly these games, but if it's not possible in SL it is not because lag framerate drops are intrinsic to that type of fluid, fast paced action.

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

SL’s flexibility comes at a cost and should be part of any comparison.

This is absolutely true, but at the same time we shouldn't conflate SL's flexibility with all of its problems and shortcomings. Some of them, sure. Like I said, I don't know that SL could ever host the type of fast paced  combat that we see in games like Fortnight, and SL's flexibility in terms of content and environment may well be a part of that. However, at the same time, SL could run much, much, MUCH better than it currently does, without sacrificing any of that flexibility, if LL can just get people to optimize their content better. (Or, you know, at all.) There.com remains a good example of this. A virtual world much like SL, filled with user created content and customized avatars, but with vehicles and games that worked so much better than anything you'll find in Second Life. (There.com did have other shortcomings which is why it's no longer a major player in the market, but we shouldn't ignore what it got right.)

 And LL should be trying to get people to optimize, because all excuses aside, combat, vehicles, and all types of scripted interaction in SL are really bad compared to what most people out there are used to. And if LL can alleviate the problem at all, it's bound to make SL more appealing to a broader market of potential users. The trick is not flushing what makes SL great out in the process, and I think we've shown in this thread that this is not only possible, but actually fairly easy as long as you understand SL's strengths and what draws most people to it in the first place. (Which, unfortunately, LL has not always shown they do.)

 Linden Lab does appear to be making some good strides lately. It remains to be seen whether or not they can deliver, but Animesh, Gridwide Experiences, improved system avatars, and other projects LL has been working on or announced in the past six months are all among many things LL needed to do years ago. So if they can deliver, and they can keep development on the right track, SL might very well be able to pull of a bit of a revival. Fingers crossed.

 

[animats]

15 hours ago, MarieVanGoethem said:

Sex sells.
It  solves all the deficiancy mentioned above...
"Second life A world for Adults"

That's 3DXchat. Where the sex animations always align accurately. Like every other modern virtual world out there, it runs more smoothly and at higher frame rates than SL.

3DXchat recently added building and vehicles. Now users are starting to use it as a general-purpose virtual world, hangout space, and roleplay area. Much to the annoyance of the escorts and their management.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

WoW’s combat tends to be player verses AI bad guys...

Um ... no.

WoW has a major esports scene that's been running for almost a decade.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/esports/arena

 

 

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Linden Lab does appear to be making some good strides lately. It remains to be seen whether or not they can deliver, but Animesh, Gridwide Experiences, improved system avatars, and other projects LL has been working on or announced in the past six months are all among many things LL needed to do years ago. So if they can deliver, and they can keep development on the right track, SL might very well be able to pull of a bit of a revival. Fingers crossed.

I agree, so long as they look outside the box and see the potential possibilities in these new releases and how their userbase may use them. They have to be aware or at least somewhat aware of how people (not just those that go to their meetings) are going to use these new systems so as they can stay ahead of it and ensure optimisation and a reduction in lag is at the fore.

I still am dumbfounded by them not realising that people will make mesh avatars over the default avatars if they didn't update the default ones, especially given that an update to the default avatar to a new quality mesh was requested for years before mesh was released. They even had time after the release of mesh and perhaps when the first users started to look at mesh bodies to say to the userbase "oh hey, don't go to far in creating mesh bodies as we are planning to update the old bodies". Sure technically it would have been a lie from them making people think they already thought of this (which they should have), but in doing so at least they would have stagnated mesh body releases enough to update their default bodies to something better and in the meantime ensured that at least the new user that comes in doesn't get stuck with a default body that would turn any perspective modern user away.

Sure there would have been other bodies still released to use over the default one, however due to labs oversight, not only did they instigate and make obsolete the default body (I know some people still use it) and contribute further to the a lag by onion layer avatars they also now have had to push through baked on mesh when the default avatar already had all this in place. (BTW I am not saying mesh body diversity we have now is a bad thing or that baked on mesh shouldn't eventually of been released)

When and if labs release new features, it is these kind of QA things that labs should be ensuring never happen again as their development schedules to fix other issues within sl get pushed back as they realise these shortcomings and try to fix the optimisation and lag issues they in themselves create by not fully exploring how people in world are going to use said 'improvements'.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Drayke Newall

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

I still am dumbfounded by them not realising that people will make mesh avatars over the default avatars if they didn't update the default ones, especially given that an update to the default avatar to a new quality mesh was requested for years before mesh was released. They even had time after the release of mesh and perhaps when the first users started to look at mesh bodies to say to the userbase "oh hey, don't go to far in creating mesh bodies as we are planning to update the old bodies".

Heads up, LL DID create their own mesh bodies, pretty much before the current brands hit the big time, when almost everyone was in system avatars. About the same time as they released "fitmesh".

The new LL mesh avi's were standard noob issue for a while, and you've never seen such a collection of fugly no mod no use wasted content in your life.

Problem is they hired some mesh maker used to making "disposable cannon fodder NPC" meshes for first person shooters, and told him to make some "supernatural war in the night" themed npc  meshes for a "video game" and that's exactly what they got.

Despite having a full mesh avatar body and head combined, the clothing came with it's own alpha layers, redundant really, as when worn on the mesh bodies it had been maid for, the clothing needed no alphas, and worn without the mesh body it didn't fit anyone.

No two of the mesh avis could share clothing, or even hair, all were no mod. Eventually LL blogged that this was a mistake and that the avis were now mod... Turned out they meant the shapes were mod, nothing else. But since the mesh avis were non fitted fitmesh, they only responded to skeletal sliders anyway, so all you could really change was the height, and limb length. People generally didn't bother.

And don't even ASK about the "hi i am new i bought a skin but it doesn't show up when i wear it" questions every damn day from arriving noobs who couldn't figure why their new system skin wouldnt work on a no mod mesh body with no applier system and non SL compliant UV's.

LL eventually shuffled the new "LL mesh avatars" off into the library, and made NEW noob island issue avatars, system avatars with simple mesh clothing and hair.

...

Don't wonder *WHY* it is LL don't make "new cool mesh avatars" just be glad they left the whole business to people who can do it better.
 

[Drayke Newall]

18 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Snip.

Yeah, know they created those horrible mesh avatars. I meant the default system avatar, which would be entirely possible to update.

The thing is labs is in a position where they could hire (or contract) a person to update their system body to something better. It doesn't need to be "OMG Good" just an update that at least is competitive and allows new users to be able to straight off the bat use the system avatar without being scared away due to how bad they look.

Then when they delve more into avatar modding/dressing etc. they can buy the user made ones if need be.

Even if labs took alternative steps. Is it not possible for them to have vendors on noob island of the various user made bodies? At least this will show potential users that there are alternatives you just need to buy them (DLC style haha). Even their older pre 2010 noob island had a store on it where you could buy or get for free various user made items.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Drayke Newall

[Klytyna]

6 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

I meant the default system avatar, which would be entirely possible to update.

Somebody already did, years ago...

There was a Jira whose name /number I cannot remember of hand, about an improved system avatar, with tweaks to weighting and UV mapping, most notable fixes were the "your chest folds on its self when you lean forward" and the weirder distortions in the crotch area.

Storm-???? or something.

Somebody actually made the files for the new avatar, in "viewer 2 file format", and you could download them and drop them into your viewers data folders, to overwrite the default ones, so YOU would see the improved avatars.

It probably needed additional work, but most of the job was already done, hell, LL could have just bundled the files into the installer for their next official viewer, and bullied FS into doing the same.

Officially... Nobody gave a rats backside.

Then mesh happened, and non human avatars, and things like Utilizator's "Avatar 2.0", and unrigged mesh boobs, lips, rigged mesh butts, unrigged mesh feet.

Then fitted mesh, and BOOM, nobody gave a rats backside about fixing the system avatar, especially when replacing it with 3rd party stuff generates 5% sales tax for LL on every MP avatar enhancement item sold...

Then it was Project Stupid, and they expected they would be throwing all the SL stuff away in "a year to two when SL-2 goes live", so SL was left to rot... For three years...

Now?

Project Stupid has failed to replace SL, and it's panic time, a sudden spurt of "responding to the user base" and "upgrading loads of things" and "major investments", so now they are muttering about "System Avatar TNG".

And like Star Trek TNG, it's probably going to be some years after most people have forgotten the Original Series, and will be seriously compromised by "responding to the opinions of concerned citizens". I don't doubt there will be the equivalent of a Deanna Troi character inclusion, some where in the mix too...

Crewman: "Captain... Ten Romulan WarBirds have decloaked all around us! They are firing full spreads of photon torpedos!"

Picard: "Shields UP! Arm the phasers, take evasive action, fire at everything!"

Troi-Beast: "Captain... I'm sensing hostility..." *wagges finger disapprovingly* "Can't we all just hug and get along?"

Picard: "Mr Worf... If this insane hippie tart opens her mouth again on the Bridge again, you have my EXPRESS permission to cut her in half with a Bat'Leth!"

Worf: "HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!"

...

I don't know what the "Deanna Troi" in "System Avatar TNG" will be, but I'm certain that the Lab will insert one, even if they have to delay release a whole year while they find something...

[Theresa Tennyson]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I still am dumbfounded by them not realising that people will make mesh avatars over the default avatars if they didn't update the default ones, especially given that an update to the default avatar to a new quality mesh was requested for years before mesh was released. They even had time after the release of mesh and perhaps when the first users started to look at mesh bodies to say to the userbase "oh hey, don't go to far in creating mesh bodies as we are planning to update the old bodies". Sure technically it would have been a lie from them making people think they already thought of this (which they should have), but in doing so at least they would have stagnated mesh body releases enough to update their default bodies to something better and in the meantime ensured that at least the new user that comes in doesn't get stuck with a default body that would turn any perspective modern user away.

Sure there would have been other bodies still released to use over the default one, however due to labs oversight, not only did they instigate and make obsolete the default body (I know some people still use it) and contribute further to the a lag by onion layer avatars they also now have had to push through baked on mesh when the default avatar already had all this in place. (BTW I am not saying mesh body diversity we have now is a bad thing or that baked on mesh shouldn't eventually of been released)

When and if labs release new features, it is these kind of QA things that labs should be ensuring never happen again as their development schedules to fix other issues within sl get pushed back as they realise these shortcomings and try to fix the optimisation and lag issues they in themselves create by not fully exploring how people in world are going to use said 'improvements'.

Right now the average new fashionista buying a Maitreya mesh body and a Catwa mesh head will need to buy over $30 worth of Lindens to do that, and they do it enthusiastically. This is even before buying clothes.

If you're running a business your goal isn't having people in your store, it's having people who spend money in your store.

 

Edited August 16, 2018 by Theresa Tennyson

[Penny Patton]

51 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Right now the average new fashionista buying a Maitreya mesh body and a Catwa mesh head will need to buy over $30 worth of Lindens to do that, and they do it enthusiastically. This is even before buying clothes.

If you're running a business your goal isn't having people in your store, it's having people who spend money in your store.

You have to look at the big picture. How many potential SL users get pushed away by the added complexity mesh bodies add to the already overly complicated, user unfriendly nightmare that is Second Life? Of course, it's impossible to say for sure, but it doesn't take a psychic to know that making your product overly complicated is going to push away potential users and SL has always had an unreasonably, and entirely unnecessarily, steep learning curve. And right now SL already has fewer people than it did when mesh was introduced.

Mesh bodies also fractured the clothing market, not only limiting the clothing you can find that will work for whatever specific mesh body you choose, but also making it more difficult for third party clothing creators to make sales.  Add to that, the locked down, no-mod nature of the mesh heads/bodies that bullied their way to the top by abusing DMCA and such, and now you've got a situation where as a clothing maker you can't even make clothing for the top selling bodies unless they allow you to.

 If you don't think this has had an overall negative impact on the SL economy I don't know what to tell you.

Mesh bodies are fine for niche markets, but they should never have become the mainsteam go-to. Drayke is right, Linden Lab needed to update the system avatars before mesh became a thing. It would still be in their best interest to do so. 

[Phorumities]

10 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Yeah, know they created those horrible mesh avatars. I meant the default system avatar, which would be entirely possible to update.

The thing is labs is in a position where they could hire (or contract) a person to update their system body to something better. It doesn't need to be "OMG Good" just an update that at least is competitive and allows new users to be able to straight off the bat use the system avatar without being scared away due to how bad they look.

Then when they delve more into avatar modding/dressing etc. they can buy the user made ones if need be.

Even if labs took alternative steps. Is it not possible for them to have vendors on noob island of the various user made bodies? At least this will show potential users that there are alternatives you just need to buy them (DLC style haha). Even their older pre 2010 noob island had a store on it where you could buy or get for free various user made items.

I guess this is a noob question but what exactly is the default system avatar "made of" if its not a mesh . I'm pretty sure its not made of prims.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Phorumities
changed a word

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

You have to look at the big picture. How many potential SL users get pushed away by the added complexity mesh bodies add to the already overly complicated, user unfriendly nightmare that is Second Life? Of course, it's impossible to say for sure, but it doesn't take a psychic to know that making your product overly complicated is going to push away potential users and SL has always had an unreasonably, and entirely unnecessarily, steep learning curve. And right now SL already has fewer people than it did when mesh was introduced.

Mesh bodies also fractured the clothing market, not only limiting the clothing you can find that will work for whatever specific mesh body you choose, but also making it more difficult for third party clothing creators to make sales.  Add to that, the locked down, no-mod nature of the mesh heads/bodies that bullied their way to the top by abusing DMCA and such, and now you've got a situation where as a clothing maker you can't even make clothing for the top selling bodies unless they allow you to.

 If you don't think this has had an overall negative impact on the SL economy I don't know what to tell you.

Mesh bodies are fine for niche markets, but they should never have become the mainsteam go-to. Drayke is right, Linden Lab needed to update the system avatars before mesh became a thing. It would still be in their best interest to do so. 

In 2015, when mesh bodies were just starting to become popular and mesh heads were rare, Linden Lab was bragging on merchants cashing out $60 million a year. Mesh feet were noted as a big source of income for one of the creators. 

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/05/second-life-economy-feet-and-hands.html

This summer, with fewer users and fewer regions, the number was $68 million.

 

Edited August 16, 2018 by Theresa Tennyson

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

In 2015, when mesh bodies were just starting to become popular and mesh heads were rare, Linden Lab was bragging on merchants cashing out $60 million a year. Mesh feet were noted as a big source of income for one of the creators. 

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/05/second-life-economy-feet-and-hands.html

This summer, with fewer users and fewer regions, the number was $68 million.

 

It would appear that Mesh is driving the SL economy!

[Drayke Newall]

3 hours ago, Phorumities said:

I guess this is a noob question but what exactly is the default system avatar "made of" if its not a mesh . I'm pretty sure its not made of prims.

Well they are made of mesh, but crap mesh with far to few polygons. All labs need to do is look at adding more shape sliders as well as providing muscle definition and fix the face (I mean the nose and face still looks like someone got hit in the face by a moving truck and went to some cheap Taiwanese plastic surgeon to get a nose job) and it would be pretty acceptable/competitive. Having to use skins to show definition is just a bad idea in this day and age.

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

In 2015, when mesh bodies were just starting to become popular and mesh heads were rare, Linden Lab was bragging on merchants cashing out $60 million a year. Mesh feet were noted as a big source of income for the creator. 

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/05/second-life-economy-feet-and-hands.html

This summer, with fewer users and fewer regions, the number was $68 million.

That is all well and good, but that was 3 years ago. If a business owner structures their financial survivability on only one thing it inevitably ensures a bad business practice as well as a dangerous precedent in that, should the market turn they will loose potential sales or worse users due to their products becoming obsolete. We see this in labs for years putting all their eggs into the land basket only to eventually realise (too late) the unsustainability of their land pricing and now trying to regain stability in the profit margin by working out new ways to obtain the much needed cash only to see land barons jumping up and down due to potential loss in income.

Whilst clearly when mesh was released there was a large intake of people buying body related things it eventually turned for the worse. Rather than having a market where people buy individual body parts such as feet, hands, heads and bodies (giving labs in essence 4 profit streams) we now have a market where basically 2 mesh body creators (hands and feet included) and 2 mesh head creators dominate the market (halving labs potential profit streams), which would in effect result in a downturn of the profits labs gets. This domination in the market has also meant that any new mesh body creators (potential profit for labs) have very little chance of gaining any sort of traction or sales and eventually give up due to the not being able to compete as they are at the mercy of clothing makers making products for their bodies which they wont as there is no viability for that clothing maker when everyone has the dominant bodies and heads. Not to mention in one fell swoop by not updating the default body created the dreaded neck seam.

Then to top it all off, these said dominant body and head makers ensure that the cost of their products are so high that it in essence forces a user to make an investment as for average non fashionista users (fashionista's are NOT the major users in sl) or new users it is cost prohibitive to change once they have been bought not to mention they would then need to get an entire new clothing wardrobe to boot.

I have no problem with mesh bodies (so long as they get rid of the onion layer lag fest ones) but with labs not updating and improving the system body, they are shooting themselves in the foot. Labs have forced upon the new users 2 options. Live with the crappy default avatar that as mentioned are a major turn off to modern users and now getting very hard to dress up in anything new or force new users to fork out over $40 to update their avatar. Both options do not result in user retention, never will and no new user would be willing to put a lot of cash into sl on first signup. They will test the waters and then see how expensive it is to play ken and barby dress-up and leave due to there now also being no good inworld creation as they screwed that up as well.

To generate money labs need new users as it is these new users that buy the mesh bodies, clothes, build, upload etc. and also inject new life into saleable products. I don't know figures on how much profit the mesh body creators make but, whilst im sure they still make a decent profit, I bet it is going down as what happens when the 40k concurrent users all have their desired bodies and heads? 

You also cant deny that the multitude of mesh bodies a clothing maker has to make for is counter productive, fractured and ridiculous not to mention for potential customers.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Drayke Newall

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

It would appear that Mesh is driving the SL economy!

errr do you still see anything non mesh on the market?

[Love Zhaoying]

42 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

errr do you still see anything non mesh on the market?

Yes.

[Penny Patton]

7 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

In 2015, when mesh bodies were just starting to become popular and mesh heads were rare, Linden Lab was bragging on merchants cashing out $60 million a year. Mesh feet were noted as a big source of income for one of the creators. 

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/05/second-life-economy-feet-and-hands.html

This summer, with fewer users and fewer regions, the number was $68 million.

I'm not saying no one is making money, I'm saying SL's steep learning curve, among several other major issues, prevents SL from drawing in nearly as many new users as it could, and that those users pushed away are lost revenue for the Lab and for merchants in SL.

Responding to that by pointing out that people are making money in SL makes your argument come off as "people are making money in Second Life, therefore it is impossible that they could be making more money."

[Theresa Tennyson]

14 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

I'm not saying no one is making money, I'm saying SL's steep learning curve, among several other major issues, prevents SL from drawing in nearly as many new users as it could, and that those users pushed away are lost revenue for the Lab and for merchants in SL.

Responding to that by pointing out that people are making money in SL makes your argument come off as "people are making money in Second Life, therefore it is impossible that they could be making more money."

You were talking specifically about the effect of mesh bodies/heads in isolation. You argued that mesh bodies and heads as they now work had a negative effect on the market. However, the amount of money cashed out significantly rose after the widespread adoption of mesh bodies and heads. In fact, most of the other factors should have resulted in a drop in the economy.

I don't even like mesh bodies and heads; I just like math.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Theresa Tennyson

[Theresa Tennyson]

5 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

That is all well and good, but that was 3 years ago.

The increase was from three years ago to this summer. "This summer" isn't even "3 years ago" on Mercury.

[Penny Patton]

4 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You were talking specifically about the effect of mesh bodies/heads in isolation. You argued that mesh bodies and heads as they now work had a negative effect on the market. However, the amount of money cashed out significantly rose after the widespread adoption of mesh bodies and heads. In fact, most of the other factors should have resulted in a drop in the economy.

I don't even like mesh bodies and heads; I just like math.

I was commenting specifically on how these factors impacted user growth/retention and how a negative impact on growth/retention has an overall negative impact on the market (as well as LL's own revenue). If I did not convey that properly, I apologize. Also, keep in mind that a negative impact does not necessarily mean we see a drop in transactions, it also applies to anything that impedes growth. It's a lot harder to pin down hard numbers here because without the ability to travel to an alternate world where LL did things differently you can't really point at any definitive number of potential customers SL has lost. But it doesn't take a time machine or future sight to know that the less user friendly, the uglier, and more confusing a product like SL is, the fewer people it will have rushing to check it out.

In addition, what we do know is that SL has fewer users, and land ownership has been declining. A 13% growth in marketplace revenue probably is not enough to offset the large drop in land ownership and land ownership is where LL makes their money, not the marketplace.

I would, however, be interested to see how the 13% marketplace withdrawals is spread among content creators. I'd wager it's a smaller number of people grabbing a larger piece of the pie. If I'm wrong, and mesh bodies are pushing more people to make more money, great, but that still leaves Linden Lab in a losing position which is bad for all of us in the long term.